More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)

Marie Stopes

(1880–1958)Passionate advocate of birth control, who did more than anyone else to make it a subject of open discussion. She was an academic botanist and geologist by profession, but in 1918 she published Married Love – a discussion of sexual relations, unusually frank for the time, which was greeted with uproar and was an immediate success. It led to so many practical enquiries about contraception that she rushed out a sequel, Wise Parenthood (also 1918, and an even greater success). She and her husband together founded in London in 1921 the Mothers' Clinic for Birth Control, the first of its kind. Her Contraception; its theory, history and practice (1923) remained for some time a standard work on the subject.